The properties of a material are affected by the processing used to form and shape the material. Processing includes heat treatment, deformation, and casting. Heat treatment is the process of subjecting a metal or alloy to a particular schedule of heating and cooling that causes desirable physical or chemical changes. Deformation is the process of forcing a piece of material to change its thickness or shape, and some deformation techniques include forging, rolling, extruding, and drawing. Casting is the pouring of melted metal into a mold so that the metal conforms to the shape of the mold when it solidifies. Heat treatment, deformation, and casting can be used in combination, and in some cases particular alloying elements are added to influence such processing in a desirable way.
Seamless metal tubing, such as copper tubing, is typically manufactured using various methods such as cast-and-roll, up-casting, or extrusion processes. To lower the cost of manufacturing metal tubing produced by conventional extrusion and casting techniques, manufacturers increase the size of billets used for forming the metal tubing. These billets are typically 100 to 1,000 pounds or more. Manufacturers thus require very large facilities to house the specialized large-scale machinery needed to processes the billets to form metal tubing. The sheer size of the equipment, and the billets processed by the equipment, causes the extrusion process to have large start-up and maintenance costs. Furthermore, limitations of the processes, such as extruding only one billet at a time, lead to manufacturing inefficiencies including limits on the amount of tubing produced per run and system component wear caused by the constant start-up and shut-down of the manufacturing process with respect to separate runs for each billet.